


Screaming is Against the Rules

by bluecrownedmotmot



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Drug Use, Gen, Hallucinations, Robogore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-05
Updated: 2016-06-05
Packaged: 2018-07-12 10:10:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7098481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluecrownedmotmot/pseuds/bluecrownedmotmot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post pacifist ending. Winners don't use magical drugs. Seems Mettaton did not heed the warning.</p>
<p>(Graphic elements are hallucinated, no real physical harm comes to the characters in this story.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Screaming is Against the Rules

“Welcome, darlings.” Mettaton stepped back from the threshold to allow Shyren and Lemon Bread into his living room. “How are you both?”

“Hey. We are not having such a great day today,” sighed Shyren as she passed the robot.

“ _Fuck you_ ,” said Lemon Bread to nobody in particular. The amalgamate glided up close to a side table, knocking it over.

“It really doesn't bother me,” said Mettaton to Shyren. “You go out, do what you need to do.”

“I can't thank you enough. I really think she calms down after spending time with you.”

Lemon Bread settled on Mettaton's couch. “ _Help me,_ _please please please please please_...”

Mettaton shrugged. “What can I say? We relate to each other. I'm not having so good a day myself.”

“Oh, why?” inquired Shyren, concerned.

“Ennui,” replied Mettaton cheerfully. “Nothing significant. Now get out of here. Have a spectacular evening.” He ushered Shyren out the door.

 

Mettaton stood with his back leaning up against the closed apartment door. He watched Lemon Bread fidget on his couch. The creature changed shape, faded, shifted, blurred. Lemon Bread reformed and eyed him, perceiving something peculiar about Mettaton now that Shyren was gone. He looked like he was dreaming, his dark glass eyes dilated and sparkling.

Mettaton dragged his teeth against his lower lip. He felt wired, sharp, unreal, content.

 

Earlier, he had felt quite the opposite of all these states of being. He had lain in bed most of the day, struggling to fathom why he felt so deplorable. Exhaustion? Stress? Loneliness?

As far as his rational self was concerned, none of these were permissible reasons to feel bad.

As far as that rational self was concerned, _Mettaton should never,_ ever _feel awful for any reason at all, darling_.

So right before Shyren and Lemon Bread had arrived, he had marched himself to his vanity, unknotted a bag hidden inside a drawer, allotted himself a small pile of snowy powder, and scraped the mound into a couple of lines with a precision knife. He had pushed one off the vanity edge into a spoon and dumped the powder into his core container.

He had felt better nearly instantly. He had dressed himself in costumes from his closet, made up his face in different ways, removed everything, lounged on his bed, and scribbled in his diary for a while. When his energy had started to subside, he had gone back for the remaining line. He had tipped his head up and closed his eyes, enjoying the restored buzz for a moment. And then Shyren ringing on the intercom had roused him.

 

Lemon Bread growled petulantly at Mettaton, bringing him back to the present.

“I am furiously high right now,” he admitted, giggling. He moved to right the side table and straightened up a few things around the living room before strolling over to his bookshelf.

“What do you want to hear tonight, love?”

Lemon Bread said nothing for a long time. “ _No Exit_ ,” the amalgamate snarled eventually.

“Yeah, no,” said Mettaton firmly. “Not when we're feeling like this. Try again.”

“ _Fuck you._ ”

“Uh huh. I've heard it before. When you're ready.”

Lemon Bread whispered incomprehensibly and rocked back and forth for a while before speaking again.

“ _A Dream Play._ ”

“I suppose that's a little better.” Mettaton found the book on his shelf, and settled down in a chair across from Lemon Bread. He found the right page, cleared his throat, took a moment to decide what kind of voices to use for the characters. He began.

“' _Where art thou, Daughter?_ '”

 

***

 

Lemon Bread had been unusually quiet for several minutes before the reading ended. Mettaton put the book down. The amalgamate was still on the couch, eyes shut, tail still, muscular arms crossed over an indistinct body. The robot got up, and walked over to the window. He watched the sun set, observed the city lights start to flicker on. He couldn't see Mount Ebott from this side, but there was a view of the towering formation from his bedroom. He looked back at Lemon Bread and quietly walked down the hallway to his bedroom.

He opened the drawer of his vanity again and took a vial full of liquid and a dropper from the very back. He walked outside onto his balcony and stared at the mountain for a while.

He went back inside.

He slid a record, one he'd acquired from Waterfall garbage years ago, out of its sleeve and turned on his phonograph. He dropped the arm down on the vinyl carelessly and there was a pop as the needle bounced into the groove on the outer edge. The first song played.

He pivoted, strutted across the carpet to the beat, and crawled into the empty clawfoot bathtub on one side of his room. He opened his soul container, uncorked the vial, and dripped several drops on the glowing inverted heart inside. He rubbed his soul and the liquid absorbed. He sighed.

“ _Can't you feel my heart... Can't you feel my heart? Can't you feel my he-aa-aart..._ ” he sang, softly.

He heard Lemon Bread humming as the amalgamate approached, but he didn't care. He felt numb. Lemon Bread saw his pink boots propped up on the edges of the tub and came over to stare at him. Mettaton stared back.

“Do you _mind_?” he asked, looking at her through low lidded eyes.

“Lewd,” said the amalgamate.

“You know it,” he winked.

Lemon Bread winked back at him.

“God, I bet I'm flirting with Aaron,” he said sheepishly.

He clicked shut the compartment on his midsection, got out of the tub, and turned on the tap briefly to wash any stray drops down the drain.

“I'm going to play until I'm too fucked up to manage,” he told Lemon Bread as he strolled past. He pulled the plug on the phonograph.

He sat down at the piano on the other side of the room and the amalgamate followed. He worked out a couple of melodies, but after about fifteen minutes, he started to feel strange. He turned around and gazed through Lemon Bread. He frowned. Something nagged at him, telling him that this was not going to go well this evening.

 

“Doll, are you in there?” he asked, gradually panicking. “I wish you were still... You were still...”

“I'm here, I'm here, I'm here.”

He rubbed his face.

“You always believed in me.”

“Mmmhmm. MmmHHHmm.”

He watched the carpet at his feet. It was like there was a breeze in the room, blowing the rug like blades of grass. He wondered if he stood up, would he fall right through the floor? It didn't seem solid enough to hold him. He got to his feet and continued to look down. He took cautious steps, passing Lemon Bread. Maybe it was sinking a little, but the floor held. He wanted music back, hoping it would steady everything, ground him, so he fit the turntable plug back into the socket and the song picked up where the needle had stopped.

Cold fingers of dread clambered up his back.

Gated reverb and screams reached his ears.

He turned and looked back up at the floating amalgamate. A huge grin broke out on the creature's face. Sharp teeth. Very sharp.

 

Lemon Bread jumped at him. He didn't even see the amalgamate move; it was too fast to perceive. His chest plate was wrenched off. He protected his face with one hand and tried pushing Lemon Bread back with the other. His hand simply caused the amalgamate to reshape. There was an intolerable grating, crunching, shrieking that he felt all the way through his body, disgustingly, from _inside_ his torso. He kicked Lemon Bread with his sharp heel and the amalgamate retreated, with wires from his chest wrapped around her, pulling out away, like taffy, bridging the growing gap between them as Lemon Bread backed up. He grabbed the wires possessively, but they snapped and he tumbled to the floor.

 

He landed awkwardly, and his left leg broke off at the knee. He sobbed. The damage to the inside of his body didn't hurt, but he did have pain receptors in his leg. He looked up to Lemon Bread, wide eyed with shock and betrayal. But there was nothing but a pile of dust where the amalgamate had been. He shook involuntarily and instead stared at his lower limb, which had come off cleanly.

_That's not right..._

He leaned over and saw his leg was stuffed inside with glossy dark hair, _his glossy dark hair_.

As he attempted to understand this discovery, a camouflaged pitch-black centipede wriggled out from its hair nest.

Fluttering and hissing rattled his chest cavity when he tried to inhale to scream. He jumped back, crawled on the carpet, dragging himself as fast as he could away, away, away... Somehow, he climbed up onto his bed after a frantic struggle to get up on his remaining leg. During this process, his right hand began melting off at the wrist for no discernible reason, just to make everything that much more nightmarishly difficult, he supposed. He pushed himself to a seated position when he reached the center of the bed, pulling what was left of his extremities close.

_Centipedes can't climb,_ he told himself.

He turned his head and noticed the fat centipede running around in serpentines on his wall.

_OKAY, nevermind. Let's focus on it not being real instead. Because it's not._

He tore his eyes off of that particular horror and he looked down at his chest. It was trashed. Something black painted the structures inside his chest cavity. Something else was hissing. Clear liquid was bubbling slowly out of a pump.

He felt like throwing up, but he couldn't look away. He leaned over dizzily and choked. He crawled to the edge of the bed, over globs of waxlike pieces of his former hand which had cooled and fused to his sheets. Something was stuck in his throat. He hooked the object with a finger and pulled.

It was a black cord.

He pulled and pulled, but it just got longer and longer, coiling onto the floor, the end twitching like the tail of a pit viper. He didn't remember having a gag reflex before, there would have been little point to Alphys designing him with one, yet he needed to get this out because he couldn't stop choking. Other things came tumbling out past his lips, rolling out on the breathing carpet... Shiny screws, unidentified pieces of small plastic, was that one of his teeth? Yes, because there was another one.

He closed his mouth as best he could, shut his eyes, curled up on the mattress, giving up.

 

He got himself to stop choking eventually. He was having a hard time thinking about anything concrete at this point. Infuriatingly, a repetitive series of piano notes wouldn't stop sounding through the darkness. No, no, no, no, NO, NO, NO, NO... But there was nothing he could do. At some point, the noise faded. Everything faded...

 

***

 

It was very dark when he opened his eyes. The turntable had failed to automatically shut off and he heard the whispering sound of the needle circumnavigating the edge of the center label. His head lay cradled on Lemon Bread's tail. The amalgamate was growling soothingly. Lemon Bread smelled like a stale, citrusy pastry, but he didn't mind. It was weirdly comforting. They were both on his bed. He looked down at his body. Nothing was amiss. His heels were tangled in his sheets. That was about it. He was tired, which made sense because he had run his battery down despite being unconscious for whatever period of time.

Lemon Bread noticed he was awake. “Alright? Alright? Alright? Alright? Alright? Alri-”

“Quiet please. Yes.”

“ _You need to stop,_ ” Lemon Bread rasped in a different voice.

“I don't want to. I'm fine,” Mettaton replied emptily.

“Liar, liar, liar, liar, liar, liar, liar, liar...”

“Yeah, yeah.” He sat up, stretched, and turned on the lamp on his nightstand.

 

When Shyren came to pick up her sister, she found a robe-clad Mettaton seated at the upright piano in his room. Lemon Bread was curled on the top of the piano like a drowsy cat.

“Did you two have a good time?”

“Sure,” said Mettaton distractedly, ripping a page from his manuscript book in half. “I got a lot of work done.”

“Liar, liar, liar, liar, liar...”

“ _Sister_ ,” Shyren said to Lemon Bread. To Mettaton, “I hope she wasn't much trouble.”

“Of course not, sweetheart. I enjoy the company.”

“I'm going to take her home. Thank you again, Metta.”

Mettaton gave her a smile that didn't reach his eyes and started playing, softly. “It's nothing.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> UNHUG me: http://motmotfluttersforth.tumblr.com/


End file.
